A Beginner's Guide to Creating a Free Email List For Authors | Smartbribe

How To grow Your Email List With Smartbribe

This is a special bonus add on to my 4 part series on Creating a free email list. Special because this is technically part 5 of 4.

You can read the other parts in this series here:

Last time I mentioned Smartbribe (and got a bit excited) as a potential way of growing your email list. Smartbribe (Now renamed GoViral), is a way of getting people that opt in to your list to share your content to all their followers. It’s a way of getting traffic to your website. It works like this:

The Three Simple Steps

Identify Your Most Popular Reader Magnet

This will be the item that you identified earlier, in the incentives section of creating your list. It could be anything from this list, but if you have more than one, pick the one that is most successful at bringing people to your email list.

Set Up a Smartbribe

Using Smartbribe, set up an additional incentive that would persuade your readers to share your work with their social media networks. This is an incentive in addition to the one you offered initially. In your mailing list signup process, you will have a ‘thank you for joining’ -type email. This is the place to put your Smartbribe. It offers the reader that’s just signed up the opportunity to get even more cool stuff from your incentive list, or your added value list.

Get the Shares

The only way your reader can get this extra cool stuff is to share! They will have to perform some action to get access to this content; send a Tweet; post to Facebook; watch a YouTube video, etc. As soon as they Tweet or post, they will have access to whatever it is you offered. You could choose to have a second Smartbribe offering a different incentive, but requiring a different action.

If you’re thinking this will put off your readers, there is no requirement to click anything. They have made the choice to opt in to receive your newsletter, they can just choose not to click the Smartbribe, meaning they just don’t get the extra incentive.

How To Set Up Smartbribe

The first step is to head over to GoViral (formerly known as Smartbribe) and when you get there, click ‘Create’ to set up your first campaign. It will take you to a page with the following info:

Select the one you want, then click ‘Next.’ You will be taken to a screen where you can choose if you want to display the giveaway in the left sidebar, or as a full screen. Choose your preferred option, then click ‘Next.’

Enter your chosen headline (seen in blue in the above image). Enter the instructions you want the reader to follow. Next, set up your chosen incentive. Just a brief description of the item is needed here. If you want, you can add more than one incentive item.

If you click ‘More options,’ you will be able to change the background image, change text colour, set the ‘decline’ text and ‘decline’ link. Click ‘Next.’

Here’s where you get to choose what you want action you want your reader to take. You have quite a few options!

Once you have selected an option from the drop down menu, you will be presented with a further option, which is to write what you want them to share, or enter the link you want them to click on. In the case of Twitter, it seems to still be working off the old character count, so just ignore that, as it will work up to the new limit. Click ‘Next.’

This is the final setup screen. The image above is one I have set up myself. You can choose to name your incentive and label the text on the button. Here is where you will link to the freebie, wherever it is stored. e.g. bookfunnel for free book downloads. You can also choose your heading and remind readers how to collect their freebie. The final choice you have is under ‘More options,’ and this is to add a ‘Ghost’ item, which is another freebie that doesn’t show up initially, but does when they share.

Finish Your Smartbribe

You’re all done! The final thing to do is click ‘Finish‘ from the tabs on the left of the screen where you will be presented with the URL of your Smartbribe. You can copy that and link it from anything on your own website or newsletter – an image, a button etc. You can even get the HTML code to install directly to your site.

You can post this Smartbribe anywhere. If you get a lot of blog traffic, you can post it there and set it up so readers will share details about your blog, your website or your newsletter sign up, or you could use it in your newsletter ‘Thank you’ email to get people to share your desired link.

To see a Smartbribe in action, just click any of the images in this post. You will see on this blog I have set up a Smartbribe on the right. It’s to get the Novella, Serial.